In the state of California a new law has been proposed that would prevent transgender people from using bathrooms in government buildings that don't match their biological sex at birth. Not only that, they could be hit with a $4,000 fine.

The Personal Privacy Protect Act, proposes that “a person shall use facilities in accordance with their biological sex in all government buildings.” If they fail to comply, then every single person in the bathroom “whose privacy was actually violated” by a transgender person entering, would be able to sue the alleged for over $4,000. Pretty disgusting, right?

If the law gets approved, it would apply to any bathrooms, dressing rooms and showers occupied by any level of government, including public schools and universities. According to the initiative, the law would not apply to private businesses unless they wanted to enforce it, in which case the law would support them.

Currently, the bill is only in its early stages – it still needs public approval. To get it approved, the California attorney general’s office must provide a summary for the law and over 365,000 valid signatures must be gathered from Californian voters. If it manages to get the required signatures then it could appear on the 2016 ballot next November.

Speaking to the LA Times, Kris Hayashi, executive director of the Transgender Law Center, called the initiative "unconstitutional and unenforceable". Hayashi explains that it "would dangerously single out Californians who don’t meet people's stereotypes of what it's like to be male or what it looks like to be female, putting everyone at greater risk of harassment and opening the state up to costly lawsuits."

It's impossible to say whether this initiative will take off, but it doesn’t look so good when over the last year lawmakers in Texas and Florida have accelerated attempts to ban transgender people from their bathrooms of choice. This feels like seeking to solve a problem that doesn't exist – just the wholly unnecessary persecution of transgender people.